Essential Kaurismäki: Selected by David Stratton

“Kaurismäki has enormous love for [his] characters. He embraces their comic pathos, and rejoices that they do not surrender”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Finland’s most celebrated filmmaker, Aki Kaurismäki was born in the small town of Orimattila, north-east of Helsinki, in 1957, and as a young man discovered the films of Bresson, Ozu and Melville. He formed a production company, Villealfa (after Godard’s Alphaville) with his older brother, Miki, and directed his first film, Crime and Punishment, in 1983. He is the complete auteur, producing, directing, scripting and usually editing his films.

Kaurismäki's studies of Finland’s battlers unfold without resorting to histrionics or overt emotion. Often using the same actors, he has created a world in which ‘ordinary’ people overcome all the odds stacked against them to achieve modest successes. The dialogue in his films is laconic and laced with stoic humour; he is committed to the use of plain language. There isn’t a streak of sentiment, despite the presence in almost every movie of a loveable dog.

Apart from canines, Kaurismäki's love for music, especially jazz and rock, comes across clearly in his work. There’s always time for a musical interlude, and his invention of a fictional rock ‘n’ roll band for the 1989 road movie Leningrad Cowboys Go America proved to be so popular that the Cowboys stayed together as a group after the movie.

Kaurismäki resisted the shift from film to digital for as long as possible, claiming it was ‘a devil’s invention’.

Kaurismäki, who has said that The Other Side of Hope (2017) will be his last film, has created a body of work inhabited by some of the most modest yet endearing characters to be found anywhere in contemporary cinema. This retrospective will be a revelation to those unfamiliar with the work of an exceptional director.

ACMI acknowledges the Traditional Owners, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on whose land we meet, share and work. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and extend our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from all nations of this land.